Undressing ethnicity - Yinka Shonibare

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by John Picton

The politics and culture entailed in the articulation of identity-and-difference are a shifting kaleidoscope of likenesses and contrasts, within and between ideas and principles, practices and people, things that are local and others that are longer distance, even international, and all of this evolving through time perhaps within an ever developing sense of tradition; and "modern" is about where it is at now. Shonibare gently insists, as Vansina did in 1984, that we recognize, question, critically distance ourselves from, take apart, and even forsake the taken-for-granted status of the ethnic paradigm with which we interpret our material, a paradigm that pervades the literature of African art with a mere delusion of certainty. (20)

I am drawn to three or four possible conclusions. Maybe ethnicity matters sometimes (no matter how problematized); maybe modernity transcends ethnicity (but we have seen Yoruba ethnicity among the elements of a local modernity); maybe ethnicity never was the all-purpose defining social parameter that we have taken it to be; and maybe each of these propositions might apply to particular aspects of any given social and material environment. (21) The best one can say of ethnicity is that it cannot be taken to provide a categorical boundedness: it is about a loosely packaged set of resources and practices that makes it possible for individuals and communities to draw upon (variously, according to the circumstances at hand) languages, political and ritual loyalties, artworks, and so on, for all kinds of reasons, including the provision of badges of being-the-same-as-and/or-different-from. But that is not for the most part why these practices exist. It is merely a use that can be made of them; and whether in ignorance or in retrospect, or even as a deliberate strategy, these resources have become identified with a form of bounded specificity. Yet the relevance of ethnicity cannot be taken for granted of art; rather, it must be demonstrated. In the meantime, Yinka Shonibare's work is also always good fun. (22)

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2001.]

(1.) Stephen Friedman has been representing Yinka Shonibare since 1996. A complete list of exhibitions and publications of his work is available from the Stephen Friedman Gallery, 25-28 Old Burlington Street, London W1S 3AN. Tel: 44-20-7494-1434, fax: 44-020-7494-1431; e-mail: info@stephenfriedman.com; website: www.stephenfriedman.com.

(2.) I was first introduced to Yinka Shonibare by Dr. Clementine Deliss, who at my suggestion organized a series of artists' talks and seminars at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) during the autumn and winter of 1991-92. This project was funded by the Research Committee of the School, to which we were most grateful. It had been the intention to publish their proceedings, but completion of the editorial work was displaced by the research that led to africa 95 (the celebration of African art held throughout the UK in fall 1995) and Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Deliss et al. 1995), which, in any case, could be said to have provided the culmination of our project. The March 6, 1992, interview with Yinka Shonibare, referred to in this paper, was to have been published with the proceedings. Publication might yet happen, but in the meantime a copy of the complete interview is available on request from jp17@soas.ac.uk.